J-SEAL2—A Secure High-Performance Mobile Agent System

  • Authors:

  • Walter Binder

  • Affiliations:

  • CoCo Software Engineering GmbH, Margaretenstr. 22/9, A-1040 Vienna, Austria w.binder@coco.co.at

  • Venue:
  • Electronic Commerce Research - Special issue on agents in electronic commerce
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

Even though the advantages of mobile agents for distributed electronic commerce applications have been highlighted in numerous research works, mobile agent applications are not in widespread use today. For the success of mobile agent applications, secure, portable, and efficient execution platforms for mobile agents are crucial. However, popular mobile agent systems do not meet the high security requirements of electronic commerce applications, are not portable, or cause high overhead. Currently, the majority of mobile agent platforms is based on Java. These systems simply rely on the security model of Java, although it is not suited to protect agents and service components from each other.In contrast, J-SEAL2 is a mobile agent system designed to meet the high security, portability, and performance requirements of large-scale electronic commerce applications. J-SEAL2 extends the Java environment with a model of strong protection domains. The core of the system is a micro-kernel fulfilling the same functions as a traditional operating system kernel: protection, communication, domain termination, and resource control. For portability reasons, J-SEAL2 is implemented in pure Java. This paper focuses on the design of the new communication model in J-SEAL2, which allows convenient, efficient, and mediated communication in a hierarchy of strong protection domains.